Extreme scenarios

Each scenario below will consume approximately half of one class (with a couple exceptions). All students will be asked to think about the two scenarios in advance of class, and one student project group will be asked to think more deeply about one half-scenario and be prepared to lead off the discussion. The following list is tentative.

Extreme scenarios (tentative)
Questions to answer: Why might this scenario occur? What are the drivers? What would be the consequences of this scenario on the whole industry? How would strategic decision making in individual companies be impacted? What do you think should happen? Will happen?
Title	Scenario A	Scenario B
Moore's law	Moore's law for processing, storage, and communications will come screeching to a halt	Innovations will result in discontinuous improvement in performance/price that will amaze even the fans of Moore's law
Multimedia	Multimedia content like voice response, speech recognition, and video are a market failure	Textual and graphical interfaces are largely displaced by multimedia and annimation
IT doesn’t matter	Information technology is commoditized and players focus on efficiency and cost	There are rapid innovations in IT functionality allowing vendors to strongly differentiate themselves
Productivity	IT capital spending in firms fails to stimulate identifiable productivity gains in the economy	Continuing innovations in the use of IT contributes to growing productivity in other industries
Privacy	Privacy violations and consumer concerns become a significant inhibitor to online commerce	Consumer concerns about privacy are overblown, and adequately addressed by technologies and public policy initiatives
Information appliance	General purpose programmable devices will move into ever smaller and more portable forms	General purpose devices will be displaced by single-purpose information appliances
Software quality	As software becomes more complex and distributed, it becomes more buggy and intolerable	New technologies, methdologies, and market forces dramatically improve the quality of software
Open source vs. components	Open source software engineering methodologies will become the norm: all products will be engineered by all comers	A vibrant marketplace for components will allow products to be assembled rather than designed
Architectural control	Control over system architecture is so powerful that this results in high industry concentration and ongoing antitrust battles	A combination of enlightened corporate citizenship, competitive strategies, and buyer behavior render architectural control largely mute
Open systems	Monolithic and prioprietary computer environments create a highly concentrated industry	Industry standards and new technologies preserve a diverse highly competitive industry
Security	Ongoing security and vulnerability disasters sink the market for distributed software applications	Innovations in security technologies render our distributed applications impervious to attack
Applications and infrastructure	The dominant industry strategy is developing new infrastructure to encourage a diversity of applications	The dominant strategy of industry is identifying new "killer applications" and using them to justify investments in supporting infrastructure
Service providers	The dominant business model will be service provider intermediaries between vendor and end user	Vendors selling products directly to end-users becomes the dominant business model
Web services	A fragmentation of distributed protocols (e.g. Java and .NET) stifles the markets and opportunities for distributed applications	Industry cooperation on standardization efforts like Web services solve all interoperability issues in distributed software
Secure platforms	Content suppliers win the day: intellectual property considerations kill the general programmable platform	Technology vendors win the day: technology is allowed to flower unfettered by restrictions imposed by content suppliers
Music industry salvaged	The music industry is decimated by piracy and forced to shrink and adopt significantly less lucrative business models	A combination of legislation, new technology, and consumer education salvages the music industry as we know it
Inter-continental outsourcing	All routine high technology jobs migrate to low-wage countries	Outsourcing of skilled engineering and programming labor is a failure
Tecommunications meltdown	The telecommunications "meltdown" will decimate capital investments and eliminate new technological innovations	Innovations in optical networking and wide-area wireless networking will bring dramatically improved capabilities and performance